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_ LOVE
"I was as a gem concealed;
Me my burning ray revealed."
Koran.
V. LOVE
Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfilments;
each of its joys ripens into a new want. Nature,
uncontainable, flowing, forelooking, in the first
sentiment of kindness anticipates already a benevolence
which shall lose all particular regards in its general
light. The introduction to this felicity is in a private
and tender relation of one to one, which is the enchantment
of human life; which, like a certain divine rage and
enthusiasm, seizes on man at one period and works a
revolution in his mind and body; unites him to his race,
pledges him to the domestic and civic relations, carries
him with new sympathy into nature, enhances the power of
the senses, opens the imagination, adds to his character
heroic and sacred attributes, establishes marriage, and
gives permanence to human society.
The natural association of the sentiment of love with
the heyday of the blood seems to require that in order
to portray it in vivid tints, which every youth and maid
should confess to be true to their throbbing experience,
one must not be too old. The delicious fancies of youth
reject the least savor of a mature philosophy, as chilling
with age and pedantry their purple bloom. And therefore I
know I incur the imputation of unnecessary hardness and
stoicism from those who compose the Court and Parliament
of Love. But from these formidable censors I shall appeal
to my seniors. For it is to be considered that this passion
of which we speak, though it begin with the young, yet
forsakes not the old, or rather suffers no one who is truly
its servant to grow old, but makes the aged participators
of it not less than the tender maiden, though in a different
and nobler sort. For it is a fire that kindling its first
embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from
a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and
enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men
and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights
up the whole world and all nature with its generous flames.
It matters not therefore whether we attempt to describe
the passion at twenty, at thirty, or at eighty years. He
who paints it at the first period will lose some of its
later, he who paints it at the last, some of its earlier
traits. Only it is to be hoped that by patience and the
Muses' aid we may attain to that inward view of the law
which shall describe a truth ever young and beautiful, so
central that it shall commend itself to the eye, at whatever
angle beholden.
And the first condition is, that we must leave a too
close and lingering adherence to facts, and study the
sentiment as it appeared in hope and not in history.
For each man sees his own life defaced and disfigured,
as the life of man is not, to his imagination. Each man
sees over his own experience a certain stain of error,
whilst that of other men looks fair and ideal. Let any
man go back to those delicious relations which make the
beauty of his life, which have given him sincerest
instruction and nourishment, he will shrink and moan.
Alas! I know not why, but infinite compunctions embitter
in mature life the remembrances of budding joy and cover
every beloved name. Every thing is beautiful seen from the
point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour, if
seen as experience. Details are melancholy; the plan is
seemly and noble. In the actual world--the painful kingdom
of time and place--dwell care, and canker, and fear. With
thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of
joy. Round it all the Muses sing. But grief cleaves to
names, and persons, and the partial interests of to-day
and yesterday.
The strong bent of nature is seen in the proportion
which this topic of personal relations usurps in the
conversation of society. What do we wish to know of
any worthy person so much, as how he has sped in the
history of this sentiment? What books in the circulating
libraries circulate? How we glow over these novels of
passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth
and nature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse
of life, like any passage betraying affection between two
parties? Perhaps we never saw them before, and never shall
meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance, or
betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We
understand them, and take the warmest interest in the
development of the romance. All mankind love a lover. The
earliest demonstrations of complacency and kindness are
nature's most winning pictures. It is the dawn of civility
and grace in the coarse and rustic. The rude village boy
teases the girls about the school-house door;--but to-day
he comes running into the entry, and meets one fair child
disposing her satchel; he holds her books to help her, and
instantly it seems to him as if she removed herself from
him infinitely, and was a sacred precinct. Among the throng
of girls he runs rudely enough, but one alone distances him;
and these two little neighbors, that were so close just now,
have learned to respect each other's personality. Or who can
avert his eyes from the engaging, half-artful, half-artless
ways of school-girls who go into the country shops to buy a
skein of silk or a sheet of paper, and talk half an hour
about nothing with the broad-faced, good-natured shop-boy.
In the village they are on a perfect equality, which love
delights in, and without any coquetry the happy, affectionate
nature of woman flows out in this pretty gossip. The girls
may have little beauty, yet plainly do they establish between
them and the good boy the most agreeable, confiding relations,
what with their fun and their earnest, about Edgar and Jonas
and Almira, and who was invited to the party, and who danced
at the dancing-school, and when the singing-school would begin,
and other nothings concerning which the parties cooed. By and
by that boy wants a wife, and very truly and heartily will he
know where to find a sincere and sweet mate, without any risk
such as Milton deplores as incident to scholars and great men.
I have been told that in some public discourses of mine
my reverence for the intellect has made me unjustly cold
to the personal relations. But now I almost shrink at the
remembrance of such disparaging words. For persons are
love's world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount
the debt of the young soul wandering here in nature to
the power of love, without being tempted to unsay, as
treasonable to nature, aught derogatory to the social
instincts. For though the celestial rapture falling out
of heaven seizes only upon those of tender age, and
although a beauty overpowering all analysis or comparison
and putting us quite beside ourselves we can seldom see
after thirty years, yet the remembrance of these visions
outlasts all other remembrances, and is a wreath of flowers
on the oldest brows. But here is a strange fact; it may
seem to many men, in revising their experience, that they
have no fairer page in their life's book than the delicious
memory of some passages wherein affection contrived to give
a witchcraft, surpassing the deep attraction of its own
truth, to a parcel of accidental and trivial circumstances.
In looking backward they may find that several things which
were not the charm have more reality to this groping memory
than the charm itself which embalmed them. But be our
experience in particulars what it may, no man ever forgot
the visitations of that power to his heart and brain, which
created all things anew; which was the dawn in him of music,
poetry, and art; which made the face of nature radiant with
purple light, the morning and the night varied enchantments;
when a single tone of one voice could make the heart bound,
and the most trivial circumstance associated with one form
is put in the amber of memory; when he became all eye when
one was present, and all memory when one was gone; when the
youth becomes a watcher of windows and studious of a glove,
a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage; when no place
is too solitary and none too silent, for him who has richer
company and sweeter conversation in his new thoughts than
any old friends, though best and purest, can give him; for
the figures, the motions, the words of the beloved object
are not like other images written in water, but, as Plutarch
said, "enamelled in fire," and make the study of midnight:--
"Thou art not gone being gone, where'er thou art,
Thou leav'st in him thy watchful eyes, in him thy
loving heart."
In the noon and the afternoon of life we still throb at
the recollection of days when happiness was not happy
enough, but must be drugged with the relish of pain and
fear; for he touched the secret of the matter who said
of love,--
"All other pleasures are not worth its pains:"
and when the day was not long enough, but the night too
must be consumed in keen recollections; when the head
boiled all night on the pillow with the generous deed
it resolved on; when the moonlight was a pleasing fever
and the stars were letters and the flowers ciphers and
the air was coined into song; when all business seemed
an impertinence, and all the men and women running to
and fro in the streets, mere pictures.
The passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes
all things alive and significant. Nature grows conscious.
Every bird on the boughs of the tree sings now to his
heart and soul. The notes are almost articulate. The
clouds have faces as he looks on them. The trees of the
forest, the waving grass and the peeping flowers have
grown intelligent; and he almost fears to trust them with
the secret which they seem to invite. Yet nature soothes
and sympathizes. In the green solitude he finds a dearer
home than with men:--
"Fountain-heads and pathless groves,
Places which pale passion loves,
Moonlight walks, when all the fowls
Are safely housed, save bats and owls,
A midnight bell, a passing groan,--
These are the sounds we feed upon."
Behold there in the wood the fine madman! He is a
palace of sweet sounds and sights; he dilates; he is
twice a man; he walks with arms akimbo; he soliloquizes;
he accosts the grass and the trees; he feels the blood
of the violet, the clover and the lily in his veins; and
he talks with the brook that wets his foot.
The heats that have opened his perceptions of natural
beauty have made him love music and verse. It is a
fact often observed, that men have written good verses
under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well
under any other circumstances.
The like force has the passion over all his nature. It
expands the sentiment; it makes the clown gentle and
gives the coward heart. Into the most pitiful and abject
it will infuse a heart and courage to defy the world, so
only it have the countenance of the beloved object. In
giving him to another it still more gives him to himself.
He is a new man, with new perceptions, new and keener
purposes, and a religious solemnity of character and aims.
He does not longer appertain to his family and society; he
is somewhat; he is a person; he is a soul.
And here let us examine a little nearer the nature of that
influence which is thus potent over the human youth. Beauty,
whose revelation to man we now celebrate, welcome as the
sun wherever it pleases to shine, which pleases everybody
with it and with themselves, seems sufficient to itself.
The lover cannot paint his maiden to his fancy poor and
solitary. Like a tree in flower, so much soft, budding,
informing loveliness is society for itself; and she teaches
his eye why Beauty was pictured with Loves and Graces
attending her steps. Her existence makes the world rich.
Though she extrudes all other persons from his attention
as cheap and unworthy, she indemnifies him by carrying out
her own being into somewhat impersonal, large, mundane, so
that the maiden stands to him for a representative of all
select things and virtues. For that reason the lover never
sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred
or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to her
mother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The
lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and
diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.
The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. Who
can analyze the nameless charm which glances from one
and another face and form? We are touched with emotions
of tenderness and complacency, but we cannot find whereat
this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, points. It is
destroyed for the imagination by any attempt to refer it
to organization. Nor does it point to any relations of
friendship or love known and described in society, but,
as it seems to me, to a quite other and unattainable
sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and sweetness,
to what roses and violets hint and foreshow. We cannot
approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves'-neck
lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the
most excellent things, which all have this rainbow character,
defying all attempts at appropriation and use. What else
did Jean Paul Richter signify, when he said to music, "Away!
away! thou speakest to me of things which in all my endless
life I have not found, and shall not find." The same fluency
may be observed in every work of the plastic arts. The statue
is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when
it is passing out of criticism and can no longer be defined
by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active
imagination to go with it and to say what it is in the act of
doing. The god or hero of the sculptor is always represented
in a transition from that which is representable to the senses,
to that which is not. Then first it ceases to be a stone. The
same remark holds of painting. And of poetry the success is
not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it
astonishes and fires us with new endeavors after the
unattainable. Concerning it Landor inquires "whether it
is not to be referred to some purer state of sensation and
existence."
In like manner, personal beauty is then first charming
and itself when it dissatisfies us with any end; when
it becomes a story without an end; when it suggests
gleams and visions and not earthly satisfactions; when
it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he
cannot feel his right to it, though he were Caesar; he
cannot feel more right to it than to the firmament and
the splendors of a sunset.
Hence arose the saying, "If I love you, what is that to
you?" We say so because we feel that what we love is not
in your will, but above it. It is not you, but your
radiance. It is that which you know not in yourself and
can never know.
This agrees well with that high philosophy of Beauty
which the ancient writers delighted in; for they said
that the soul of man, embodied here on earth, went
roaming up and down in quest of that other world of
its own out of which it came into this, but was soon
stupefied by the light of the natural sun, and unable
to see any other objects than those of this world,
which are but shadows of real things. Therefore the
Deity sends the glory of youth before the soul, that
it may avail itself of beautiful bodies as aids to its
recollection of the celestial good and fair; and the
man beholding such a person in the female sex runs to
her and finds the highest joy in contemplating the form,
movement, and intelligence of this person, because it
suggests to him the presence of that which indeed is
within the beauty, and the cause of the beauty.
If however, from too much conversing with material
objects, the soul was gross, and misplaced its
satisfaction in the body, it reaped nothing but
sorrow; body being unable to fulfil the promise
which beauty holds out; but if, accepting the hint
of these visions and suggestions which beauty makes
to his mind, the soul passes through the body and
falls to admire strokes of character, and the lovers
contemplate one another in their discourses and their
actions, then they pass to the true palace of beauty,
more and more inflame their love of it, and by this
love extinguishing the base affection, as the sun puts
out the fire by shining on the hearth, they become pure
and hallowed. By conversation with that which is in
itself excellent, magnanimous, lowly, and just, the
lover comes to a warmer love of these nobilities, and
a quicker apprehension of them. Then he passes from
loving them in one to loving them in all, and so is
the one beautiful soul only the door through which he
enters to the society of all true and pure souls. In
the particular society of his mate he attains a clearer
sight of any spot, any taint which her beauty has
contracted from this world, and is able to point it out,
and this with mutual joy that they are now able, without
offence, to indicate blemishes and hindrances in each
other, and give to each all help and comfort in curing
the same. And beholding in many souls the traits of the
divine beauty, and separating in each soul that which
is divine from the taint which it has contracted in the
world, the lover ascends to the highest beauty, to the
love and knowledge of the Divinity, by steps on this
ladder of created souls.
Somewhat like this have the truly wise told us of love
in all ages. The doctrine is not old, nor is it new. If
Plato, Plutarch and Apuleius taught it, so have Petrarch,
Angelo and Milton. It awaits a truer unfolding in opposition
and rebuke to that subterranean prudence which presides at
marriages with words that take hold of the upper world,
whilst one eye is prowling in the cellar; so that its gravest
discourse has a savor of hams and powdering-tubs. Worst, when
this sensualism intrudes into the education of young women,
and withers the hope and affection of human nature by
teaching that marriage signifies nothing but a housewife's
thrift, and that woman's life has no other aim.
But this dream of love, though beautiful, is only one
scene in our play. In the procession of the soul from
within outward, it enlarges its circles ever, like the
pebble thrown into the pond, or the light proceeding
from an orb. The rays of the soul alight first on things
nearest, on every utensil and toy, on nurses and
domestics, on the house and yard and passengers, on the
circle of household acquaintance, on politics and geography
and history. But things are ever grouping themselves
according to higher or more interior laws. Neighborhood,
size, numbers, habits, persons, lose by degrees their power
over us. Cause and effect, real affinities, the longing for
harmony between the soul and the circumstance, the progressive,
idealizing instinct, predominate later, and the step backward
from the higher to the lower relations is impossible. Thus
even love, which is the deification of persons, must become
more impersonal every day. Of this at first it gives no hint.
Little think the youth and maiden who are glancing at each
other across crowded rooms with eyes so full of mutual
intelligence, of the precious fruit long hereafter to
proceed from this new, quite external stimulus. The work
of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark
and leaf-buds. From exchanging glances, they advance to
acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery passion, to
plighting troth and marriage. Passion beholds its object as
a perfect unit. The soul is wholly embodied, and the body is
wholly ensouled:--
"Her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
That one might almost say her body thought."
Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars to
make the heavens fine. Life, with this pair, has no
other aim, asks no more, than Juliet,--than Romeo.
Night, day, studies, talents, kingdoms, religion, are
all contained in this form full of soul, in this soul
which is all form. The lovers delight in endearments,
in avowals of love, in comparisons of their regards.
When alone, they solace themselves with the remembered
image of the other. Does that other see the same star,
the same melting cloud, read the same book, feel the
same emotion, that now delight me? They try and weigh
their affection, and adding up costly advantages, friends,
opportunities, properties, exult in discovering that
willingly, joyfully, they would give all as a ransom for
the beautiful, the beloved head, not one hair of which
shall be harmed. But the lot of humanity is on these
children. Danger, sorrow, and pain arrive to them, as to
all. Love prays. It makes covenants with Eternal Power
in behalf of this dear mate. The union which is thus
effected and which adds a new value to every atom in
nature--for it transmutes every thread throughout the
whole web of relation into a golden ray, and bathes the
soul in a new and sweeter element--is yet a temporary
state. Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry,
protestations, nor even home in another heart, content
the awful soul that dwells in clay. It arouses itself
at last from these endearments, as toys, and puts on
the harness and aspires to vast and universal aims. The
soul which is in the soul of each, craving a perfect
beatitude, detects incongruities, defects and
disproportion in the behavior of the other. Hence arise
surprise, expostulation and pain. Yet that which drew
them to each other was signs of loveliness, signs of
virtue; and these virtues are there, however eclipsed.
They appear and reappear and continue to attract; but
the regard changes, quits the sign and attaches to the
substance. This repairs the wounded affection. Meantime,
as life wears on, it proves a game of permutation and
combination of all possible positions of the parties,
to employ all the resources of each and acquaint each
with the strength and weakness of the other. For it is
the nature and end of this relation, that they should
represent the human race to each other. All that is in
the world, which is or ought to be known, is cunningly
wrought into the texture of man, of woman:--
"The person love does to us fit,
Like manna, has the taste of all in it."
The world rolls; the circumstances vary every hour. The
angels that inhabit this temple of the body appear at
the windows, and the gnomes and vices also. By all the
virtues they are united. If there be virtue, all the
vices are known as such; they confess and flee. Their
once flaming regard is sobered by time in either breast,
and losing in violence what it gains in extent, it becomes
a thorough good understanding. They resign each other
without complaint to the good offices which man and woman
are severally appointed to discharge in time, and exchange
the passion which once could not lose sight of its object,
for a cheerful, disengaged furtherance, whether present or
absent, of each other's designs. At last they discover that
all which at first drew them together,--those once sacred
features, that magical play of charms,--was deciduous, had
a prospective end, like the scaffolding by which the house
was built; and the purification of the intellect and the
heart from year to year is the real marriage, foreseen and
prepared from the first, and wholly above their consciousness.
Looking at these aims with which two persons, a man and a
woman, so variously and correlatively gifted, are shut up
in one house to spend in the nuptial society forty or fifty
years, I do not wonder at the emphasis with which the heart
prophesies this crisis from early infancy, at the profuse
beauty with which the instincts deck the nuptial bower, and
nature and intellect and art emulate each other in the gifts
and the melody they bring to the epithalamium.
Thus are we put in training for a love which knows not
sex, nor person, nor partiality, but which seeks virtue
and wisdom everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue
and wisdom. We are by nature observers, and thereby
learners. That is our permanent state. But we are often
made to feel that our affections are but tents of a night.
Though slowly and with pain, the objects of the affections
change, as the objects of thought do. There are moments
when the affections rule and absorb the man and make his
happiness dependent on a person or persons. But in health
the mind is presently seen again,--its overarching vault,
bright with galaxies of immutable lights, and the warm
loves and fears that swept over us as clouds must lose
their finite character and blend with God, to attain their
own perfection. But we need not fear that we can lose any
thing by the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted
to the end. That which is so beautiful and attractive as
these relations, must be succeeded and supplanted only by
what is more beautiful, and so on for ever. _
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